In wireless networking hardware configurations, access points provide an on ramp for wireless stations to reach the Internet and other networks. A single access points can be equipped with multiple processors in order to service traffic loads generated by many wireless stations in addition to hard wired stations. Furthermore, the access point handles different types of traffic based on different types of wireless networking protocols used by wireless stations. For example, IEEE 802.11bgn (i.e., IEEE 802.11b, IEEE 802 are three types of legacy networking standards. More recently, IEEE 802.11 ac is a faster, high throughput networking standard used by some wireless stations.
However, traffic volume at a particular wireless interface has peaks and valleys depending on which stations are connected at a particular time. An individual processor may process traffic for one interface distinctly from traffic for another interface. More specifically, context switching results from changing over to process an IEEE 802.11ac network packet subsequent to processing an IEEE 802.11bgn network packet, fetches are sent out to load up the corresponding instructions. Additionally, IEEE 802.11ac network packets can have significantly larger data fields from aggregation that require more processing time, thereby increasing sensitivity to processor interrupts.
What is needed is a robust packet processor steering technique in which multiple processing cores are balanced based on actual Wi-Fi traffic over a WLAN (wireless local access network).